Towards Knowledge-Based Economy: Qatar Science and Technology Park, Performance and Challenges

Qatar's leadership established a vision with great determination and clear strategy to transform the economy towards a Knowledge-Based Economy (KBE). Over the past twenty years, Qatar Foundation (QF) has been at the forefront of ensuring science and research are essential to Qatar's transformation into KBE. This research illustrates the top-down flow of KBE implementations in the State of Qatar and the effective role of the Qatar Science and Technology Park (QSTP), from the national public policies to the achieved results including the visions, missions and strategies of the integrated innovations and entrepreneurship echo system's institutions and organizations. It analyzes the mapping between three bodies, the frameworks of KBE and Science and Technology Parks (STPs), the related public policies in Qatar with the elements of QF and QSTP; and the related global competitiveness, innovation and entrepreneurship indexes (GEI, GII and GCI). It also measures the performance of Qatar based these indexes, analyses the trends from the last decade and benchmarks Qatar against the globe and the GCC region. Furthermore, It identifies the main areas of strength and the areas for improvement. This analysis demonstrated a strong alignment between Qatar public policies, the pillars of the KBE and QSTP concepts and the pillars of the used global indexes. Moreover, it presents the advanced position of Qatar performance among the GCC countries on the related global indexes and the continuous improvements for Qatar considering its performance from the last decade.